Archive for the ‘Watkins Glen New York’ tag

For all but a couple of the last 66 years, the village of Watkins Glen, New York, at the southern end of Lake Seneca Lake, has hosted some form of racing, whether it be among sports cars, drag cars, or stock cars. But that doesn’t mean it’s all taken place on one track or even in one place in that storied town. Indeed, Watkins Glen has gone through four major iterations since re-introducing road racing to America, an evolution we can explore in vintage maps of the track.

As Watkins Glen International notes in its own history, the track originated as a dream of Cameron Argetsinger’s, an Ohio law student and World War II veteran who learned how to drive on the roads around Watkins Glen when his family spent its summer vacations there. “His father taught him to drive at 12 on these rural byways, and he later relished driving as fast as minimum safety, liberally defined, permitted,” wrote Douglas Martin for the New York Times in Argetsinger’s 2008 obituary.

After the war, Argetsinger longed for a place to drive his MG TC fast, so during the 1947 winter holiday, he laid out a race course that used the roads in and to the west of Watkins Glen. The course would start and finish in front of the courthouse on Franklin Street (State Route 14/414), head north and then west on State Route 409 out toward Watkins Glen State Park, cut south across a stone bridge that crossed Glen Creek, and then back east again on State Route 329 toward town. The entire 6.6-mile course ran on public roads – both paved and unpaved – and even crossed the New York Central Railroad, but Argetsinger saw these not as insurmountable obstacles.

Watkins Glen course map from 1950.

Instead, he got an official sanction from the SCCA, convinced the railroad to close that section of track for the day, and persuaded the town to shut down the roads for the race. Then on October 2, 1948, he gathered 21 other drivers for the first Watkins Glen Grand Prix – really just a four-lap qualifying race followed by the eight-lap grand prix.

Watkins Glen course map from 1953.

The race continued to run the initial course through 1952. Though Sam Collier had died during the 1950 race, driver deaths were more or less accepted in racing at the time, especially with such high-powered cars as Cunninghams and Alfa Romeo 8C2900s participating; however, an accident that injured 12 spectators and killed one in 1952 brought an immediate halt to the use of the Watkins Glen road course. It also brought threats of an end to racing on state highways in New York and with them higher insurance premiums, forcing race organizers to find another course.

They didn’t have to go far. The town of Dix, which encompasses Watkins Glen, worked with race organizers including Argetsinger, George Weaver and Bill Milliken to set up a course on farm roads – a course that involved no state highways – at a site southwest of the original course. The 4.6-mile course ran along Baker Hill Road, Hedden Road, Bronson Hill Road, Wedgewood Road, and what is now Montour-Townsend Road and ditched the sweeping turns and organic bends of the original course for plenty of right-angle turns, one sharply acute-angle turn, and lots of long straightaways. Racing began on the second Watkins Glen course in 1953.

It didn’t last long there, though, and some have since described the second course as a temporary one. Criticized by the racers and still on public roads, it led Argetsinger and other race organizers to seek out a more permanent and dedicated location after the 1955 grand prix. They found it, essentially, right under their noses; 550 acres of farmland on the eastern half of the second course, adjacent to Bronson Hill Road and crossing Wedgewood Road. Shorter than the two previous courses at 2.3 miles, it came together with input from racers and Cornell engineering professors alike and incorporated sweeping turns, a few straightaways and a couple sharp turns. It opened in time for the 1956 grand prix and the next year played host to NASCAR for the first time.

For some reason, just about every map of this third course configuration shows the track with north to the bottom of the map, perhaps because when situated that way, it somewhat (if you squint hard) resembles the original course maps (which showed the track with north to the right). Go figure.

Then in 1971, a year after Argetsinger resigned from the track, it went through its most recent major reconfiguration. The biggest change, the addition of “the Boot,” added a number of turns to the southern end of the track, but the reconfiguration also made some changes to the northern end of the track, squaring off that segment and preserving the hard right turn but at the same time erasing the sweeper labeled Fast Bend in the third-generation maps in favor of expanded pit areas.

(As you can see above, maps of the fourth course configuration largely, but not entirely, flipped north back to the top of the map.)

The track has since changed hands a number of times – Corning Glass bought it and re-opened it following the track’s early 1980s bankruptcy (apparently the end result of the debt the track incurred in the 1971 reconfiguration) and later sold it to International Speedway Corporation, the track’s current owner. Yet it has remained largely unaltered, save for a chicane added to the back straightaway, just before the Chute Loop. Wedgewood Road within the track nowadays serves as the track’s midway, and some of the second course’s roads have since been eliminated or re-routed to accommodate the third and fourth course’s configurations.

Watkins Glen course map from 2012.

While racing has never returned to the original road course since 1952, participants in the annual festival at Watkins Glen have been able to take a few parade laps of the Argetsinger course with a police escort, about the closest anybody’s going to get to legally racing the streets of Watkins Glen these days.

For one long weekend in September, the glory of Watkins Glen past returned with the Glenora Wine Cellar U.S. Vintage Grand Prix. The event combines several days of on-track activity – incorporating the full 3.67-mile, 11-turn road course (NASCAR events skip “The Boot” and run a shorter course) – with a festival in downtown Watkins Glen that celebrates the original race run on the streets between 1948 and 1952.

While racers began arriving for practice and qualifying mid-week (they were at the track from Wednesday, September 5 through Sunday, September 9), for many locals, the Friday afternoon celebration through town – where the roads of the original course are closed for the vintage racers and people line the streets to cheer on the parade – remains the highlight. The parade begins with a police-escorted rally from the historic track to the village, where the cars are parked on the street for a couple of hours before getting another police and pace car-escorted run of three laps of the original 6.6-mile course. Along with impromptu mini-car shows sprouting up at various parking lots downtown, tens of thousands showed up, both in the village and along the course. One family, dressed to the nines, sat along the edge of their property at a linen-covered table, enjoying a fine meal, raising their glasses as the vintage race cars roared by.

And roar they did.

Large crowds gather in the village of Watkins Glen, New York, for the annual Vintage Festival that celebrates the original races run on the 6.6-mile street course from 1948 through 1952.

It may have only been an exhibition run, but it was no Sunday drive with grandma, that’s for sure. We managed to hitch a ride in the official Watkins Glen pace truck that tailed the competitors. From Trans-Am Mustangs to 1930s Grand Prix veterans to MGBs to even a mighty Porsche 917, race traffic wailed through three glorious laps around the circuit, the cheers downtown only occasionally besting the roar of the engines.

Steve Grabski in his 1967 Volvo 122 leads Bob Leitzinger in his 1970 Datsun 510 out of “The Boot” at Watkins Glen.

The festival has become a major, go-to event each summer in this small town of just 2,000 people that swells to perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 during the festival. No one seems intent on giving estimates of the number in attendance these days, but there was nary a place downtown to squeeze in during the running of the parade. Appropriately enough, the atmosphere is festive and the vintage cars that spectators bring range from Model Ts and Model As to rat rods to 1960s muscle and all manner of European and Japanese sports cars.

At the track, under the sanction of the Sportscar Vintage Racing Association, the racers were divided into 11 groups, with some running together. The pre-war racers, for instance, were grouped with the likes of MG T series cars, Midgets, Spitfires and other small-bore post-war racers. That group, in particular, fielded as many as 36 cars, the oldest entrant a 1926 Frazer Nash driven by John Kerridge of Del Mar, Calfornia, who has owned the car for several decades. Of course, “vintage” racing isn’t always so vintage. Witness the fastest group that saw the likes of a 1980s Porsche 962 taking on a 2005 Audi R8 LMP prototype, which seemed to be barely breaking a sweat as Travis Engen set a blistering pace behind the wheel of it.

Vintage racers queue up for the run through the original street course as tens of thousands of spectators line the 6.6-mile route.

Mustangs and Corvettes were well represented, as is often the case at vintage racing events. With Mustang a featured marque this year, the Ford pony cars were grouped together for the run into the village and back, their V-8s barking off the downtown walls as they drove through. Other classes with plenty of entrants included sports racers and the bigger horsepower post-war sports cars. For the first time in several years, the Formula 1 contingent was there, with the Historic Grand Prix racers bringing over at least a dozen F1 cars from the 1970s, though just 11 were classified in the results. But results rarely matter in vintage racing, given the disparate cars and varying skill level of the largely amateur drivers.

Denis Bigioni muscles his 1948 Talbot Lago T26C as he approaches the final turn before the main straight at Watkins Glen.

The weather put a rather tight damper on things on both the Saturday and Sunday, with heavy rains actually shutting the track down just as the F1 cars completed their first laps during Saturday’s race. When the heaviest of rain lifted, but there was still a steady drizzle, the sportcar guys still came out and splashed their way around the track, albeit at a slower pace.

There is a wonderful sound at vintage races, both on the track and in the paddock, as throttles are cracked open on everything from shrieking F1 cars to thundering big-block Corvettes to the crackling sound of any of a number of small-bore British engines and just about everything in between.

Next year’s Watkins Glen Vintage Grand Prix, which will celebrate Mini as its featured marque, will take place September 6. For more information, visit GrandPrixFestival.com.

* If you aren’t checking out the Friday Art Show every week on the H.A.M.B., you’re missing a lot of great, mostly lowbrow and lowbrow-inspired, art. One of the regulars there is Bomonster, who works entirely in scratchboard and seems to have a lot of fun doing it.

* Gary Littlejohn’s Cinderella Cart is one of several groovy 1960s/1970s trikes that Working Class Kustoms recently rounded up photos of. This is the kind of unbridled awesomeness that happens when you put LSD in the country’s water supply.

* Finally, we spotted these photos of another Studebaker building on Flickr’s Vintage Car Showrooms pool, this one in St. Petersburg, Florida. A little googling, and we see it’s at 600 Fourth St. South. Shouldn’t there be a registry for these Studebaker buildings?

So, Hemmings Nation, Jack Shea has placed a good amount of faith in you. Noting what sleuthing we’ve done on the cars and locations in old photographs in the past, he sent along this photograph of his grandparents, one of a larger stash of photographs of them vacationing in New England in the 1930s and 1940s. Jack writes:

The one I enclosed is a typical shot with the car prominently positioned front and center! My grandparents on both sides where real car people, having bought more than the usual number in their life time. My Grandfather in the photo is Patrick Haligan a WW1 Veteran who also was a Jersey City NJ firefighter for 37 years and a New York City Liquor Control Officer from 1945 to 1954.

Jack also supplied a location of Watkins Glen, New York, though so far I’ve found no reference to a Sigrid Lodge or High View House in Watkins Glen. There was a High View House hotel in Haines Falls, New York, down in the Catskills, and another one in the Catskills near Liberty, New York, that made headlines in 1962 when it burned down, killing four people.

As for the 1936 Chevrolet, it appears to be a Master Deluxe, perhaps a sedan, judging from the distance between windshield and rear window.

Triumph fans, if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to drop everything and make plans to attend this weekend’s Vintage Grand Prix of Watkins Glen in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Triumph is this year’s featured marque, and hundreds of Coventry’s finest are expected to be on hand. But there’s much more: The cars of the legendary Group 44, the racing team that brought so much glory to Triumph, will be featured, as will TS1 LO, the very first production TR2. And Kas Kastner, the genius behind Triumph’s racing efforts, will be present to award the Kastner Cup, given to one Triumph competitor each year.

Watkins Glen is hallowed as the site of the first road race run in the U.S. after World War II. The Vintage Grand Prix is a reenactment of those 1948-1952 races, held on the original 6.6-mile circuit of village streets, and is ranked as the largest vintage motorsports gathering in the East. In addition to the race, the weekend is filled with events, including the Walk of Fame award ceremony, a historical panel discussion with Kastner and three other Triumph luminaries, and a judged concours d’elegance. There will be plenty of non car-related events, too, including live music, wine tasting, food courts and fireworks at dusk.

The festival takes place from September 3 through 7, with most of the events, including the Grand Prix tribute and the concours, scheduled for Friday, September 5. For more information, visit www.grandprixfestival.com.

(This post originally appeared in the September 4, 2008, issue of the Hemmings eWeekly Newsletter.)